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Fire in Tollhouse (state of California): Heat wave and dry winds exacerbate the situation
Photo: STEPHEN LAM / REUTERS
In San Francisco and other California regions, people woke up to an orange sky on Thursday.
The phenomenon was created by the smoke from the fires, which mixed with fog and blocked the sunlight - scenes like those from a disaster film.
The devastating bush and forest fires on the west coast of the USA have now devastated entire places and killed at least eight people in the past 24 hours.
The authorities warned on Thursday that the number of victims could rise in the next few days as many areas are completely cut off from the outside world.
Five cities in the state of Oregon have been "largely destroyed," said Governor Kate Brown.
A one-year-old baby was among the fatalities.
According to police, the boy died on Wednesday (local time) in Washington State when his parents escaped the flames with him.
The parents survived seriously injured.
According to police, the bodies of two victims of the fire disaster were found in the Marion district of Oregon.
According to local media, it was a twelve-year-old boy and his grandmother.
Three fatalities were also found in Northern California.
Previously, at least eight people in California had been killed in the wildly raging bush and forest fires there for weeks.
Only "smoking ruins" remain of large parts of the city of Talent in Oregon, as resident Sandra Spelliscy told the AFP news agency: "There are several parts of the city where there is not a single building, only skeletons of chimneys or charred household appliances."
The renewed massive spread of the fires is facilitated by a heat wave and dry wind.
Hundreds more houses have been destroyed since the weekend, tens of thousands of people had to flee from the flames.
In the coming week the temperatures should finally drop, which could provide some relief, said the fire department in California.
Hundreds of thousands of residents were without electricity
The catastrophe could become the "greatest loss of human life and property" to bush and forest fires in Oregon's history, warned Governor Brown.
Washington Governor Jay Inslee also called the extent of the fire "unprecedented and heartbreaking".
He blamed climate change for the fires.
In California, the flames have already destroyed a record area of more than 8,000 square kilometers.
The so-called Bear Fire recently spread at breakneck speed around 240 kilometers north of San Francisco.
It combined with older fires and threatened the city of Oroville.
More than 170,000 households in California were without electricity because the utility company PG&E shut down the power grid in large parts of the state due to the extreme risk of forest fires.
In the past, defective power lines repeatedly caused fires to break out.
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